Jubilee

The businesses and residents of Eton have been cleaning and decorating frantically for the past couple of weeks. The Windsor and Eton Facelift project encouraged us all to smarten up at the same time. The incessant rain in April postponed lots of the planned external painting but the jubilee deadline wasn't going to move. So "wet paint" signs have adorned most of the buildings for the past two weeks and now it is all coming together. Flags are being erected, plants planted, bunting strung across the street and everything looking spick and span for the jubilee weekend. Its great to see the community pulling together.

Our video is complete

New Look

In case you haven't noticed I have (accidentally) changed the look of the Tastes Delicatessen blog. It really wasn't the plan. What I was meant to be doing is adding the topic labels you can see to the right and tidying them up a bit so there weren't so many. But there was this button on the admin screen to "update to new blogger" and I sort of clicked it to see what would happen. There were some new templates to choose. I clicked on one to see how it would look. But then I was stuck! No way to go back to my old template (which I'd spent hours making five years ago). So onwards it had to be, and three hours later I'd managed to get the new template looking almost how I want it. Not sure what those white boxes are though (some sort of missing image?). I can't get rid of them (yet). The only thing which seems to work is to post an empty entry which they seem to attach to. Hopefully they aren't too distracting.

Tastes Delicatessen - The Movie

If you popped into the deli over the past few days will probably have noticed Mark and his camera (if you didn't notice him, then you may well have a walk on part!). Corporate Photographer Mark Earthy has been here for many hours, filming what should be a movie, but in reality will be a short promotional video. It's been great fun (or it was until filming me was mentioned). What I've seen so far looks amazing and I can't wait to see the finished product. Watch this space (and YouTube!).

Going Viral!

I've been using pinterest for a few months now; to collect recipe ideas. Imagine my surprise at logging in yesterday and seeing a photograph of a cheese wedding cake which I made last summer right there on the homepage!

It was a photograph taken by Chloe Browne, pinned by a lady in California, from a blog article by 100 layer cake. I'm not sure if the total number of re-pins is recorded anywhere, but by the end of the day it felt like the cheese wedding cake photograph was everywhere. It's lovely to see it capturing so many people's imagination and being added to their wedding mood boards. The feedback has been great!

Open as usual this bank holiday weekend

Tastes Delicatessen will be open as usual on Good Friday (6th April) and Saturday (7th April).

Moving Goalposts

Just when I thought I was getting on top of things, facebook has changed! Tastes now has a facebook timeline and cover photograph. I left it all to the very last minute (too busy selling cheese!). But the photograph I picked today (the day it all switched over) seems to work nicely. And seeing as facebook had my attention I also updated some of the photographs of the shop, chose a personal url (http://www.facebook.com/TastesDeli) and added a newer style of "find us on facebook" link to our web site. I'll pop the link here as well, just in case! You can never have too many fans (although they aren't called fans any more – what are they? Likes, likers?).

Major Works

Over the past month I have been carrying out some "major works" on the Tastes web site. Lots of it was very boring behind the scenes stuff for security, to improve speed etc. But I've also re-photographed most of the products, improved lots of product descriptions, added some new categories (snacks and raw foods) and most significantly added lots of new stock (there are 350 products available to buy online today). I've also added a little google map to our contact page, just in case the original hand drawn map isn't sufficient (and because I can!). So if you haven't visited Tastes Online for a while, do have a look. I hope you like it.

Happy Valentine's Day

There is still time to pick up a Valentine's gift from Tastes Delicatessen. We've plenty to offer including handmade chocolate hearts, "Love" tea, and chilli jam and chilli oil in beautiful heart shaped jars and bottles. This week's cakes even have a "Love theme"; with hearts on our traditional shortbread, and chocolate brownies topped with strawberry fondant, covered in dark chocolate with edible confetti heart decorations. And they do taste as good as they look!

We'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper....

Yesterday I overheard a customer telling her partner to put down the vegetables he was about to buy; "we'll get that in Waitrose, it'll be cheaper".

So today I checked her assumption, and am happy to report it was incorrect:

At the moment our broccoli is £2.50 per kilo, Waitrose is £1.69 per 300g head (or £5.64 per kilo, twice the price of ours). Our baby new potatoes are £1.65 per 750g pack (about £2.20 per kilo), Waitrose are £1.49 per pack, but the pack is only 500g (so £2.98 per kilo). Waitrose's cheapest loose potatoes are 86p per kilo, ours are 60p per kilo. Our peppers are £3.50 per kilo, in Waitose they are £4.68. Even the avocados are 99p for small and £1.39 for large compared to our 90p (for what I think is large). In Waitrose the cheapest carrots, onions, lemons and apples cost exactly the same as ours.

There might be plenty of reasons to shop at a supermarket, but thinking the vegetables will be cheaper than the local deli should not be one of them.